Isaac Asimov's SF-Lite

by Gardner R. Dozois

  Something in the way he moves . . .

  Seth and Jason were pointing and laughing, other people were looking embarrassed. *

  “Peace, Love, and Brotherhood,” he said, flashing us the < peace sign.

  The voice. I knew it after twenty years. Hoyt Lawton.

  Hoyt Lawton had been president of the fucking Key Club in 1969! He’d worn three-piece suits to school even on the days when he didn’t have to go eat with the Rotarians! His hair was never more than three-eighths of an inch off his skull—we said he never got it cut, it just never grew. He won a bunch of money from something like the DAR for a speech he made at a Young Republicans convention on how all hippies needed was a good stiff tour of duty in Vietnam that would show them what America was all about. Hoyt Lawton, what an asshole!

  And yet, there he was, the only one with enough chutzpah to show up like we were all supposed to feel. Okay, I’m older and more tolerant now. Hoyt, you’re still an asshole, but with a little style.

  By about 10:10 there were a hundred people there. Excluding husbands, wives. Significant Others and kids, maybe sixty of the Class of ’69 had taken the trouble to show up.

  Olin divided us up so we wouldn't run into each other. I started my group of twenty or so (Hoyt was in Olin's group thank god) on the second floor. We climbed the stairs.

  “You’ll notice they have air conditioning now?’’ I said. There were laughs. Austin hits ninety-five by April 20 most years. We’d sweltered through Septembers and died in Mays here, to the hum of ineffectual floor fans. The ceilings were twenty feet high and the ceiling fans might as well have been heat pumps.

  “How many of you spent most of the last semester here?” I said, pointing. Two or three held up their hands. “This used to be the principal’s office; now it’s the copy center. Over there was Mr. Dix’s office itself.” Lots of people laughed then, probably hadn’t thought of the carrot-headed principal since graduation day. He'd had it bad enough before someone heard him referred to as “Red” by the Superintendent of Schools one day.

  “That used to be the only office that was air-conditioned, remember? At least you could get cool while waiting to be yelled at.” I pointed to the air-conditioning vents.

  That there air duct I didn’t say is the one that Morey Morkheim got into and took a big dump in one night after they'd expelled him one of those times. Only in America is the penalty for skipping school expulsion for three days.

  Mr. Dix had yelled at him after the absence, “What are you going to do with your life? You’ll never amount to anything without an education!”

  In seven months Morey was pulling in more money in a weekend than Dix would make in ten years—legally, too.

  We moved through the halls, getting curious stares from students in classrooms with closed glass doors.

  “Down here was where the student newspaper office was. Over there was the library, which the community college is using as a library.” We went down to the first floor.

  “Ah, the cafeteria!” It was now the study room, full of chairs and tables and vending machines. “Remember tomato surprise! Remember macaroni and cheese!”

  “Fish lumps on Friday!” said someone.

  Half the student body in those days had come from the parochial junior highs around town. In 1969, parochial was the way you spelled Catholic. Nobody in the school administration ever read a paper, evidently, so they hadn’t learned that the Pope had done away with “going to hell on a meat rap” back in 1964. So you still had fish lumps on Friday when we were there. The only good thing about having all those Catholic kids there was that we got to hear their jokes for the first time, like what’s God’s phone number? ETcumspiri 220!

  “Down there, way off to the left,” I said “was the band hall. I You remember Mr. Stoat?” There were groans. “I thought so. Only musician I ever met who had absolutely no sense of rhythm.”

  Ah, the band hall. Where one morning a bunch of guys locked themselves in just before graduation, wired the intercom up to broadcast all over school, and played “Louie, Louie” on tubas, instead of the National Anthem, during home room period. It was too close to the end of school to expel them, so they didn’t let them come to the commencement exercise. In protest of which, when they played “Pomp and Circumstance,” about three hundred of us Did the Freddy down the aisles of the municipal auditorium in our graduation gowns.

  We passed a door leading to the boiler room, where all the teachers popped in for a smoke between classes, it being forbidden for them to take a puff anywhere on school grounds but in the Teachers’ Lounge during their off-hour.

  I stopped and opened it—sure enough, it was there, dimmed by twenty years and several attempts to paint over it, but in the remains of smudged-over day-glo orange paint on the top inside of the door it still said: Ginny and Ray's Motel.

  Ginny Balducci and Ray Petro had come to school one morning ripped on acid and had wandered down to the boiler room and had taken their clothes off. My theory is that it was warm and nice and they wanted to feel the totality of the sensuous space. The school’s theory, after they were interrupted by Coach Smetters, was that they had been Fornicating During Home Room Period, and without hall passes, too!

  After Ginny came down, and while her father was screaming at Ray’s parents across Dix’s desk, she said to her father, “Leave them alone. They didn’t have their clothes off!”

  “Young lady,” said Dix. “You don’t seem to realize what serious trouble you’re in.”

  “What are you going to do?” asked Ginny, looking the principal square in the eye, “Castrate me?”

  I answered some questions about the fire escapes that used to be on the south side of the building. “They fell on a community college student one day four years ago,” I said. “Good thing we never had to use them.” We were outside again.

  “Over there was the gym. World’s worst dance floor, second * worst basketball court. Enough sweat was spilled there over the years to float the Big Mo. We can’t go in, though, they now use it to store visual aids for the Parks and Rec department.”

  There was the morning when Dix had us all go to the gym for Assembly. His purpose, it went on to appear after he had talked for ten minutes, was to try to explain why the Armed Forces recruiters would be there on Career Day, along with the realtors and college reps and Rotarians who would come to tell you about the wonders of their profession in the Great Big World Out There. (Some nasty posters had appeared on every bare inch of wall in the building that morning questioning not only then-presence on Career Day but also their continuing existence on the third rock from the sun.)

  He was going on about how they had been there, draft or no draft, war or no war, every Career Day when a small sound started at the back of the ranked bleachers. The sound of two stiffened index fingers drumming slowly but very deliberately dum-dum-thump dum-dum-thump. Then a few other sets of fingers joined in dum-dum-thump dum-dum-thump, at first background, then rising, louder and more insistent, then feet took it up, and it spread from section to section, while the teachers looked around wildly Dum-Dum-Thump Dum-Dum-Thump.

  Dix stopped in mid-sentence, mouth open, while the sound grew. He saw half the student body—the other half was silent, or like the jocks led by Hoyt Lawton, beginning to boo and hiss— rise to its feet clapping its hands and stamping its feet in time—

  DUM DUM THUMP DUM DUM THUMP

  He yelled at people and pointed, then he quit and his shoulders sagged. And on a hidden passed signal, everybody quit on the same beat and it was deathly silent in the gym. Then everybody sat back down.

  I think Dix had seen the future that morning—Kent State, the Cambodian incursion, the cease fire, the end of Nixon, the fall of Saigon.

  He dismissed us. The recruiters were there on Career Day anyway.

  ***

  I'd almost finished my tour. “One more place, not on the official stops,” I said. I took them across the side street and down half a block.

&nbs
p; “Ow wow!” said someone halfway there. “The Grindstone!”

  We got there. It was a one-story place with real glass bricks across the whole front that would cost $80 a pop these days. The place was full of tools and cars.

  “Oh, gee,” said the people.

  “It’s now the Skill Shop,” I said. “Went out of business in 1974, bought up by the city, leased by the community college.”

  Ah, the Grindstone! A real old-fashioned cafe/soda fountain. You were forbidden on pain of death to leave the school grounds except at lunch, so three thousand people tried to get in every day between 11:30 and 12:30.

  One noon the place was packed. There was the usual riot going on over at UT ten blocks away. All morning you could hear sirens and dull whoomps as the increasingly senile police commissioner, who had been in office for thirty-four years, tried dealing with the increasingly complex late twentieth century. Why, the children have gone mad he once said in a TV interview.

  Anyway, we were all stuffing our faces in the Grindstone when this guy comes running in the front door and out the back at two hundred miles an hour. Somebody made the obvious stoned joke—“Man, I thought he’d never leave!”—and then a patrol car slammed up to the curb, and a cop jumped out. You could see his mind work.

  A. Rioter runs into the Grindstone. B. Grindstone is full of people. Therefore: C. Grindstone is full of rioters.

  He opened the door, fired a tear-gas grenade right at the lunch counter, turned, got in his car and drove away.

  People were barfing and gagging all over the place. There were screams, tears, rage. The Grindstone was closed for a week so they could rent some industrial fans and air it out. The city refused to pick up the tab. “The officer was in hot pursuit,” said the police commissioner, “and acted within the confines of departmental guidelines.” Case closed.

  “Ah, the Grindstone,” I said to the tour group. “What a nice place.” A wave of nostalgia swept over me. “Today, shakes and fries. Tomorrow, a lube job and tune-up.”

  I was so filled with mono no aware that I skipped the picnic that afternoon.

  ***

  The Wolfskill Hotel! Scene of a thousand-and-one nights’ entertainments and more senior proms than there are fire ants in all the fields in Texas.

  A friend of mine named Karen once said people were divided into two classes: those who went to their senior proms and went on to live fairly normal lives, and those who didn’t, who became perverts, mass murderers or romance novelists.

  If you were a guy you got maybe your first blow job after the prom, or if a girl a quick boff in the back seat of some immemorial Dodge convertible out at Lake Travis. The hotel meant excitement, adventure, magic.

  I hadn’t gone to my senior prom. A lot of us hadn’t, looking on it as one more corrupt way to suck money from the working classes so that orchids could die all over the vast American night.

  There were some street singers outside the hotel, playing jug band music without a jug—two guitars, a flute, tambourine and harmonica. They were fairly quiet. The cops wouldn’t hassle them until after eleven P.M. They were pretty good. I dropped a quarter into their cigar box.

  You could hear the strains of the Byrds’ “Turn! Turn! Turn!” before you got through the lobby. The entertainment committee must have dropped a ton o’ bucks on this—they had a bulletin board out front just past the registration table with everybody’s pictures from the yearbook blown up, six to a sheet.

  It was weird seeing all those people’s names and faces—the beginnings of mustaches and beards on the guys, we’d fought tooth and nail for facial hair—long straight hair on the women— names that hadn’t been used, or gone back to three or four times, I in the last twenty years.

  I paid my $10.00 fee (like in the old days. Dance Tonight! Guys fifty cents Girls Free!).

  Inside the ballroom people were already dancing, maybe a hundred, with that many more standing around talking and laughing in knots and clumps, being polite to each other, sizing up what Time’s Heedless Claws had done to each other’s bodies and outlooks.

  Bob and Penny were already there. He was in a bluejean jacket and pants and wore a clear plastic tie. Penny was stunning, in a green velour thing, beautiful as she always is early in the evenings, before alcohol turns her into a person I don’t know.

  I was real spiffed out, for me: a nice sport coat, black slacks, a red silk tie with painted roses wide as the racing stripe on a Corvette.

  There were people there in $500 gowns, $300 suits, tuxes, jeans, coveralls. Several were in period costumes; Hoyt had on another, much better than this morning’s nightmare, but still what I describe as Early Neil Young. He was, of course, with a slim blonde who had once been a Houston cheerleader, I’m sure.

  I saw some faculty members there. They had all been invited, of course. Ten or so, with their husbands or wives, had come. Even Mr. Stoat was there. It hit me as I looked at them that most of them had been in their twenties and thirties when they were trying to deal with us on a daily basis, much younger than we were now. God, what a thankless job they must have had— going off every day like going back up to the Front in WWI, trying to teach kids who viewed you as The Enemy, following along behind everything you did with the efficient erasers in their minds! Maybe I’m getting too mellow—they had it easier with us than teachers do now—at least most of us could read, and music was more important than TV to us. Later, I told myself, I’ll go over and talk to Ms. Nugent who was always my favorite and who had been a good teacher in spite of the chaos around her.

  There were two guys working the tapes and CDs up on the raised stage. I didn’t recognize the order of the songs so knew they weren’t playing one of my tapes. On the front part of the stage were a guitar and bass, a drum set and keyboards.

  So it was true, and seemed the main topic of conversation, although as I passed one bunch of people I heard someone say “Those assholes? Them?’’

  Barb showed up, without a date, of course. She took my hand and led me toward the dance floor. “Let’s dance until our shoulders bleed,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am!” I said.

  ***

  I don’t know about you, but I’ve been hypnotized on dance floors before. Sometimes it seems as if the tune stretches out to accommodate how long and hard you want to dance, or think you can. The guys working the decks were switching back and forth between two cassette players and the music never stopped— occasionally songs only I could have recorded showed up. I didn’t care. I was dancing.

  (I’ve seen some strange things on dance floors in my life— the strangest was people forming a conga line to a song by the band Reptilikus called “After Today, You Got One Less Day To Live.”)

  “Ginny’s here,” I said to Barb. Barb looked over toward the door where Ginny Balducci’s wheelchair had rolled in. One weekend in 1973 Ginny had gone off for a ski weekend with an intern, and had come back out of the hospital six months later with a whole different life. “I’ll say hi in a minute,” said Barb.

  We danced to the only Dylan song you can dance to, “I Want You,” “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” Buffalo Springfield, Blue Cheer, Sam and Dave, slow tunes by Jackie Wilson and Sam Cooke, then Barb went over to talk to Ginny. I was a sweating wreck by then, and the ugly feeling from the night before was all gone.

  I started for the whizzoir.

  “You won't like it,” said a guy coming out of the men’s room.

  The smell hit me like a hammer. Someone had yelled New York into one of the five washbasins. It was half full. It appeared the person had lived exclusively for the last week on Dinty Moore Beef Stew and Fighting Cock Bourbon.

  A janitor came in cursing as I was washing my hands.

  I went back out to the ballroom. Mouse and the Trapps “Public Execution” was playing—someone who doesn’t dance recorded that. Then came Jackie Wilson’s “Higher and Higher.”

  “Dance with me?” asked someone behind me. I turned. It was Sharon. She must have Gone Borne
o that afternoon. She’d been somewhere where they do things to you, wonderful things. She had on a blue dress and seamed silk stockings, and now she had an Aunt Peg haircut.

  “You bet your ass!” I said.

  About halfway through the next dance, I suffered a real sense of loss. I missed my butthole-length hair for the first time in ten years. The song, of course, was “Hair” off the original Broadway cast recording, Diane Keaton and all, and Joe Morton’s wife Patricia, who had never cut hers, it grew within inches of the floor, suddenly grabbed it near her skull with one hand and whipped it around and around her head, the ends fanning out like a giant hand across the colored lights above the stage. Joe continued his Avalon-ballroom-no-sweat dancing, oblivious to the applause his wife was getting.

  Then they played the Fish Cheer and we all sang and danced along with “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die-Rag.”

  Then the lights came up and the entertainment director, Jamie Younts-Fulton, came to the mike and treated us to twenty minutes of nostalgic boredom and forced yoks. The tension was building.

  “Now,” she said, “for those of you who don’t know, we’ve got them together again for the first time in nineteen years, here they are, Craig Beausoliel, Morey Morkheim, Abram Cassuth, and Andru Esposito, or, as you know them, Distressed Flag Sale!”

  ***

  It was about what you’d expect—four guys in their late thirties in various pieces of clothing stretching across twenty years of fashion changes.

  Morey’d put on weight and lost teeth, Andru had taken weight off. Abram, who’d been the only one without facial hair in our day, now had a full Jerry Garcia beard. Craig, who came out last, like always, and plugged in while we applauded—all four or five hundred people in the ballroom now—didn’t look like the same guy at all. He looked like a businessman dressed up at Halloween to look like a rock singer.

  He was a little unsteady on his feet. He was a little drunk.